Excellence, then, is a state concerned with choice, lying in a mean, relative to us, this being determined by reason and in the wa...y in which the man of practical wisdom would determine it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Excellence or virtue is a settled disposition of the mind that determines our choice of actions and emotions and consists essentia...lly in observing the mean relative to us ... a mean between two vices, that which depends on excess and that which depends on defect.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

It is because everything is relativeThat we shall never see in that sphere of pure wisdom and...Entertainment much more than groping shadows of an incompleteFormer existence so close it burns like the mouth thatCloses down over all your effort like the momentOf deathLESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

To revolt is a natural tendency of life. Even a worm turns against the foot that crushes it. In general, the vitality and relative... dignity of an animal can be measured by the intensity of its instinct to revolt.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

The whole visible universe is but a storehouse of images and signs to which the imagination will give a relative place and value; ...it is a sort of pasture which the imagination must digest and transform.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Beauty consists of an eternal, invariable element, whose quantity is excessively difficult to determine, and of a relative, circum...stantial element, which will be, if you like, by turns or all together, the era, its fashion, its morals, its passions.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Most literature on the culture of adolescence focuses on peer pressure as a negative force. Warnings about the "wrong crowd" read ...like tornado alerts in parent manuals. . . . It is a relative term that means different things in different places. In Fort Wayne, for example, the wrong crowd meant hanging out with liberal Democrats. In Connecticut, it meant kids who weren't planning to get a Ph.D. from Yale.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

What's this, Aurora Leigh,You write so of the poets and not laugh?...Those virtuous liars, dreamers after dark,Exaggerators of the sun and moon,And soothsayers in a tea-cup? I write soOf the only truth-tellers, now left to God,--The only speakers of essential truth,Opposed to relative, comparative,And temporal truths;...The only teachers who instruct mankind,From just a shadow on a charnel-wall.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »